While humans are inherently social beings, psychology studies suggest that their social skills are gradually fine-tuned over time and with experience. Understanding when different social skills emerge and how they typically develop could help devise new strategies that encourage people to behave prosocially and cooperate with others around them.

Researchers at London School of Economics, University of Stavanger and University of Milan-Bicocca recently carried out a study exploring how social behaviors emerge and become stable across childhood. Their findings, published in Nature Human Behavior, suggest that while kindness and cooperation are intuitive behaviors in early childhood, they later become deliberate and part of children’s personal disposition.

“Our study was initially motivated by the wish to extend findings of our previous paper in Scientific Reports,” Elena Nava, senior author of the paper, told Medical Xpress.